More than Cabaret:
Stage director Roger Brunyate discusses the two works in this
program, with relation to the German tradition of political cabaret,
and as social and moral documents of the Weimar Republic and the Third
Reich.

For the 2002–03 season at Theatre Project, Peabody will present a
double bill focusing on issues that came to the fore in Germany in the
first half of the twentieth century, but whose echoes are still with us
today. Collectively titled Berlin/Munich, the program will feature
two miniature masterpieces. The Berlin part is Kurt Weill’s
Mahagonny Songspiel. Written in 1927, his first collaboration with
Bertolt Brecht, it is a raucous indictment of the empty materialism of the
Weimar Republic, but it might as easily apply to the commercialism of our
own time. Originally intended as an “anti-opera” to be
performed in a boxing arena, the score mixes the popular language of Tin
Pan Alley (literally so – much of the text is in fractured English!)
with the pungent sound of a night-club band.

Protest
march in scene 6 of Mahagonny Songspiel

This will be followed by the longer of the two works: Udo
Zimmermann’s emotionally shattering two-person opera Die Weisse
Rose, about the anti-Nazi student resistance movement of the same name
in Munich in 1942–3. In early 1943, Hans Scholl and his sister
Sophie were arrested by the Gestapo, summarily tried, and guillotined for
distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich and several other German cities.
Hans, who was 24, had belonged to the Hitlerjugend and fought on
the eastern front, but had become deeply troubled by what he saw around
him; his sister Sophie was 21; both were medical students and devout
Christians. Together with some friends and one professor, they formed the
movement Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose) to awaken others to the
truth of what was really going on. Although they knew they would surely be
arrested, they did what they did in order to affirm for their
contemporaries that the spirit of freedom still exists, and to show later
generations that not all Germans turned a blind eye to the evil that
rampaged around them. The text, which includes material from the
Scholls’ own diaries and passages by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others,
ranges from dreamlike reminiscence to impassioned denunciation. The
musical setting is eclectic, at times in a popular vein like Kurt Weill,
at times romantic, at times searing. The overall effect of this opera is
an emotional and spiritual experience that will not easily be forgotten.
The opera will be given in an English translation by Stephen Wadsworth.
Both works are directed and designed by Roger Brunyate, and conducted by
JoAnn Kulesza in her Peabody Opera conducting debut.